poverty

An orphaned dog and an orphaned 10-year-old girl find each other while enduring poverty and homelessness in Boston.

When her grandmother reveals that the daughter that she had given up for adoption is coming from America to visit her Vietnamese family, nine-year-old Binh is convinced that her newly-discovered aunt is wealthy and will take care of all the family's needs.

In the 1890s, struggling to support himself and his invalid father among the gangs on New York's Lower East Side, thirteen-year-old Sam Glodsky joins mobster Monk Eastman and his own archenemy, Izzy Fink, in a plot to rescue Eastman's prize racing pigeon from a quarantined steamship.

Meggy Swann, a girl who walks with the aid of two sticks, arrives in Elizabethan London, along with her goose Louise, to stay with her father who really does not want her, and while he pursues his dream of transforming base metal into gold, Meggy undergoes a transformation herself.

Jumping freight trains during the Great Depression leads fourteen-year-old Collie to a friendship with men and boys on their way to "somewhere else.".

Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.

Twelve-year-old Dubliner Kathleen Delaney is given the chance to take Irish dancing lessons in 1937 and discovers she has a talent for it.

Delly Porter enjoys the feel of soft dirt beneath her feet as she walks to and from school, but after a classmate makes her feel ashamed of having no shoes she learns that her parents and others, too, see value in things that do not cost money.

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding with the help of the devoted dog Sounder.

When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849 London, fourteen-year-old John Huffman must take on unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant relative for help to determining why people are spying on him and his family.